Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday May 22, 2012 @04:03AM
from the do-as-we-say dept.

Fluffeh writes "The EU has accused Google of abusing its dominant position in advertising to benefit its own advertising services at the expense of competitors. In a twist however, rather than initiating formal proceedings, the EU has given Google a chance to settle the whole matter without much fuss. They outlined four changes that Google can make that will put it firmly back in the good graces of the EU. Google has been given 'a matter of weeks' to propose remedies to the four issues — which all tie in with how search results are displayed, their format and their portability to other platforms. This matter has come before the EU based on complaints by a few small companies and Microsoft."
The four issues: Displaying results to their own services specially, use of user reviews from other sites in search results, Advertising "...agreements result in de facto exclusivity requiring them to obtain all or most of their requirements of search advertisements from Google," and concerns that Google is imposing "...contractual restrictions on software developers which prevent them from offering tools that allow the seamless transfer of search advertising campaigns across AdWords and other platforms..."

This is actually what most people commenting on Google's antitrust issues miss. The comments about how easy it is for people to change search engines is not relevant because it isn't even the issue. They cannot see forest from the trees.

Google's antitrust issues are not about the everyday user. Remember, you are not their customer. You are their product. The antitrust issues are about abuse towards other companies, ad networks and services. You may not care about this if you're selfish and just think abou

I can easily be described as a google fanboy - I have (and love) my Android Phone (a Galaxy Nexus, in fact). I signed up to Gmail back when it was invite-only and people only had about 6 invites to give out (or sell/trade, as was the case back then) and I even use Google+. However, I completely agree with what the above poster is saying. Fanboyism aside, no company should be able to abuse its position in the marketplace. Even if Google isn't entirely guilty or found to not be doing anything deliberately that harms competition, its still absolutely appropriate that they're investigated and regulated accordingly.The same should apply to any and all businesses with a large hold on the market, be they software companies, banks, pharmaceuticals, governments and so on.

I like Google on the whole and I genuinely believe that the founders were genuine in their model of "Do no Evil", but its a huge company now with a lot of power - I find it hard to believe that every single employee, every manager, every executive is entirely altruistic and doing what's best for everyone rather than what's just best for them/Google.

I am not sure if I am a google fanboy or not. I just use the best product which is often Google. I use GMail, Chromium, and Google Search. I have android on my phone/laptop and contributed to the Go Programming Language. What makes me probably not a google fanboy is I would drop any one of their products in a heartbeat if I found something better.
Looking at the changes the EU wants, my answer to all but one is that I would personally be upset if they did what the EU wanted.

The problem is the double standards being applied. Whilst yes Google does abuse it's position in some cases, the things it doesn't aren't in any way as bad as the things other tech companies are guilty of. Microsoft's abuse of the standards process with OOXML, Apple's abuse of it's vertical integration, monopoly on music to lock people into it's platform, and it's strong market share in digital content to distort for example, the ebooks market, Facebook's constant illegal breaches of various data protection

It's a pretty silly argument to say that Google have been unfairly singled out, and quite wrong too. The companies that you mention have all had their share of regulatory intervention, especially in the EU. Your first example, Microsoft (exactly who was inconvenienced by their OOXML standard?) is the first company that springs to mind when thinking of EU intervention. Remember the browser choice screen [browserchoice.eu] or the two billion dollars in fines [mashable.com]?

They got it recognised as an international standard giving it increased legitimacy, when the standard was incomplete and realistically impossible for competitors to support fully. So to answer your question, people who were inconvenienced by Microsoft's hijacking of the standards process, is anyone who wants to be able to use free software, and not pay a Microsoft tax to be able to interoperate with other businesses in the exchange of documents.

But the EU likes to push hard against Companies (US based or not) that have a European competitor. Such as the case against Intel, the fact that the European company of AMD is one of their biggest competitors had nothing to do with it? Or Nokia vs. Apple and Samsung.

Just admit it, Europe is just as corrupt as the rest of the first world. Once you admit it, then you can start spotting it, and fixing it.

But the EU likes to push hard against Companies (US based or not) that have a European competitor. Such as the case against Intel, the fact that the European company of AMD is one of their biggest competitors had nothing to do with it? Or Nokia vs. Apple and Samsung.

Just admit it, Europe is just as corrupt as the rest of the first world. Once you admit it, then you can start spotting it, and fixing it.

Please agree to my point of view, because I don't want to search for facts or change my opinion. It would depress me if there was a nicer place in the world than where I live.

The EU has initiated anti-trust action against just as many European companies as foreign companies. Look at the mobile phone market for example, European companies like Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile etc. have been under a constant barrage of regulation from the EU for years over roaming fees etc.

Also your first example doesn't even make any sense whatsoever, AMD isn't even a European company, it's American.

Part the reason for Europe being quite good in this respect is because it is not one country, there's a lot of inter-country rivalry in the EU itself - you can guarantee a British judge wont rule in a French company's favour against a US company for example because of some feeling he must protect a European company because the Brits generally love the French about as much as they love the Germans - i.e. not very much. Similarly you'll get the same sentiment to various other countries in Europe, from their own neighbours. There just isn't some feeling of a European superstate that must trounce outsiders at all costs. Successive British and Czech governments for example have aligned far more closely with Washington than they have Brussels. There just isn't some grand European patriotism for your theory to work out.

The fact you've no idea whatsoever about the topic you're conversing about doesn't make you right, it just makes you a tit. Please, do Slashdot a favour, don't jump into conversations you don't have the foggiest about and assert that you're right and no other suggestion could possibly have any validity.

The biggest irony of it all is that the only reason you're complaining about it is because you yourself feel it's your patriotic American duty to stand up for American companies.

If only you knew which companies were actually American. That would be a start.

Microsoft, who filed the complaint, is probably the biggest abuse of using their monopoly to push new products. Walk into a store selling PCs and you'll see bing ads on microsoft computers. re: the other stuff, google respected copyright when it came to reviews, but they removed such reviews anyways.

Google is intentionally abusing their position to promote their own products and hide competitors. Yes, this thing matters.

LMFTFY:

Google is intentionally abusing their position to improve the overall user experience. Yes, this thing matters.

There, that's better.

When I do a search from JFK to LAX, guess what - it is NICE that Google immediately knows that I am interested in a flight and shows me prices. It is NICE that they will show me a map and photos of my destination. It reduces the number of clicks and get gets me what I want faster. The same can be said for all of Google's optimized in-line services. Furthermore, I have never in my life ever heard of evidence showing that Google actually hides the result of a competitor... do you have any evidence to back that up (that is not already refuted)?

Google is very upfront about everything they do, and there are ample other search engines you can use as a user, and that people can advertise on as well.

Google's competitors want to do exactly this. They are at the core concerned that google search gives users such information so easily, and want to use european regulators to put a stop to this to get traffic to their crappier services.

I agree. This whole issue is a they-were-here-first but I-want-profits-too scenario. If Bing can't deliver similar quality search results and/or "experience" (some do like that word in this context:)) than the only thing they can do is force them to change through 3rd par

This is similar to how costco works. They have control over the retail space, and their goal is to make the shopping experience great for consumers.. That means dirt cheap, at the expense of suppliers. Suppliers go out of business, that's the point. So costco offers cheap ink refills, potentially putting companies like HP out of business. HP hates Costco. Lots of suppliers hate Costco, lots of company hates Costco, but consumers love Costco. Because only consumers matter. The difference here is competitors

Not only that, but the company that complained about Google offering this additional information in search results was Microsoft, who do exactly the same thing in their own search engine Bing. They're fully aware that Google search will be less usable if the EU gets its way, and are effectively using the EU to try and force Google to cripple their search in order to drive users to Bing.

(Well, technically I think it was the Microsoft subsidiary which provides shopping results for Bing which submitted the EU complaint, but it's effectively the same thing.)

When I do a search from JFK to LAX, guess what - it is NICE that Google immediately knows that I am interested in a flight and shows me prices.

Google scrapes the data from another site. That site gets to pay for the expense of collecting the data, and the bandwidth of Google's scraper, but gets to display none of their ads. Google comes along, takes the data, and displays their ads next to it instead.

I would not call that nice.

Would you also call it nice if your ISP dynamically deleted the ads from all of the sites you visit and displayed their own ads instead? Because in a way, that's what Google is doing.

Another case in point is the exclusivity agreement in AdWords. If you want to use AdWords (and you often have to because it's the prominent player and they also own Doubleclick since long time ago), you cannot run your ads on competitors services. It is prohibited in the terms. That is just monopoly abuse.

Mind providing a link to this point? I work at Google, more on the client side-- and have never heard this issue come up, which I find rather odd given that a lot my clients certainly do it. Not saying you're wrong, but I find it hard to believe.

The original comments from the EU about adwords was something to do with the data entered for adwords ads not being portable to other ad networks or something obscure and stupid like that, presumably the EU wants you to be able to export your ad data into XML or something odd. The GP shill managed to translate that into some bullshit about exclusivity agreements that simply isn't true.

The forest for the trees is that a: microsoft does this and b: they're the ones leading this campaign against google and encouraged others to campaign against google. But nice try.

changing search engines is exactly true, and you *can* do that. However, scraping data from "competitors" (which they aren't) - scraping data from sites with good data to aggregate their reviews is not an abuse of position. It's aggregation of information. Taking yelp reviews for google maps reviews is an agreement google had with yelp. That's not discrimination, that's a strawman to call that "competition" or abusing competition.

The adwords thing is something stupid, but it's not any different than Microsoft getting entire corporations to sign up for using windows and requiring that they do not support any other OS (yes, this is in every company wide subscription based windows 7 deployment/office365 agreement).

Nice try to mislead the entire issue, step by step, along with a similar reply. from Neokushan. Can we stop with the obvious shills to just make this sound like it's a real problem? the "I love (thing), but (comments of hate for a product)" is a really old shill technique and we're bored of it. It's like "I'm an MSCE and love windows and do windows deployments all day, but microsoft is evil". We're tired of that kind of shit.

So why is this story about Google's abuse of their search engine and not about the European Union's abuse of regulatory power? I consider the former a case of normal use. Providing search engines, particularly on the scale that Google does, requires some sort of funding. If Google gets it in part by using it for their advertisement, then I see that as normal use.

In contrast, I don't see the case for EU interference in this matter. Other search engines can do the same thing that Google is doing, so I don'

Another case in point is the exclusivity agreement in AdWords. If you want to use AdWords (and you often have to because it's the prominent player and they also own Doubleclick since long time ago), you cannot run your ads on competitors services. It is prohibited in the terms. That is just monopoly abuse.

Hello, dear Astroturfer (brand new account, immediate posting, anti-Google bent, false information about Google practices). I see that you at least are changing tack. No longer is Google evil because it is abusing its search monopoly, it is now evil because they are abusing their ad monopoly.

Here's one area where you have a point, and I'll leave it up to the courts to ferret out the details: if they are going into exclusive agreements with sites that leverage their position in one market (say, email) to arg

This you are their product meme is ridiculous. We are not their product. We are one their customers, as are the merchants trying to sell to us. The whole, "you are the product" idea makes about as much sense as claiming that shoppers are the product in a shopping mall. It is not insightful!

And yes, the ability of users being able to change search engines is relevant. To contrast with Microsoft anti-trust issues, Microsoft refused to allow PC makers to install alternative browsers on their systems to push th

No of course not, europeans are evil; they will plot and plot, and when you least expect it, they will come out of the bush, tackle you and steal all your money. Never go there!

That being said, generally they will come at you like a ton of bricks if they suspect you of doing something illegally (cartel), but it's just a matter of antitrust they will ask you to get back in line or face the wrath of some severely worded letters.

There is no need to block Google. We can just keep fining them until they comply. If they refuse to pay the fines or comply, we will close their offices and order banks to stop money transfer to Google. As EU is huge revenue source to Google (unlike China where they were losing), Google will comply in seconds if that happens.

Yes, but we should be glad we don't have a mini-Napoleon like you prancing around at the EU.

You cannot simply fine companies randomly on a whim - you actually need to find wrongdoing against them, which is what this case is about. And that process, like any kind of litigation, costs money. It's expensive for *all* parties involved. So the EU probably sees an easy way out - Google makes a plea bargain, essentially, and they don't have to go to all the hassle of trying to prove Google did wrong, as well

I have a feeling that if it was a French or Danish firm, we wouldn't see half this amount of noise from the EU throne.

This old caveat again, the fact still remains that the biggest fine EU has handed out so far was against an European company(Siemens I think)
And well if I remember correctly Google is incorporated in Ireland(because of the low corporate tax) so I guess technically Google is an European company...

I don't know that Apple or Facebook is considered large enough in a specific market to be covered by the antitrust legislation, that is possibly why. But the European Council is preparing legislation that forbids Facebook to sharing user information with advertisers etc, without the users express permission.
The Council is apparently also investigating whether Facebook's facial recognition system is contradictory to EU privacy legislation.

Personally I think it's good that there is at least one Governmental organization that doesn't instantly roll over whenever big corps complain.

What the EU is essentially saying is that Google is breaking the law. They can pay the fine, or battle it out in court (and risk a higher fine perhaps). The EU has many tools at its disposal. A fine would be step 1. But if Google would be so stupid to consistently break the law, or not pay the fine, then they might seize their European assets or otherwise obstruct their business inside the EU. A total block might be the final option.

You are clearly unaware of the difference between European and English style law.

European law is purposive, which is all about "vibes". You don't get highly specific laws and binding precedent to tell you exactly what's right and wrong. But you do get principles and cases which illustrate how those principles should be applied.

To an Englishman or American, it might be seen to be no rule of law at all - surely it's too easy for a biased judge to re-interpret principles, particularly with pressure from the go

The lack of a jury is just as much a difference in style of law. In the European system the courts cannot judge the law, they merely enforce it, and they argue that this function is better fulfilled by competent(hopefully) and trained professionals rather than some random person picked off the street.

Juries makes sense when they are empowered not to just decide on guilt or but also whether the law is fair, but from what seems to be the norm in the US today judges routinely strip juries of that power.(at l

Yes if implemented properly juries can be a barrier against tyrannical laws but since the SCOTUS thinks that a trial judge should have no obligation to inform a jury of their right to nullify laws and if Wikipedia is to be believed then it is common practice for a judge to remove a juror if they believe that the juror is aware of the power of nullification(if true then how can this be allowed to persist in a system that is designed with the sole purpose to prevent such things?). When this is the system it i

Walk into a department store with computers running windows and you'll see microsoft displaying ads for Bing. Then Microsoft used their monopoly to push their IE product, instant messaging, and a plethora of other products. Can we expect investigations into Microsoft? How about apple for itunes, amazon used their dominance to push the kindle fire. Keep in mind, these products often resulted in other companies go out of business. Why focus on Google?
Your point is the rules can change, for no apparent reas

No, this is just a preliminary investigation, if it proceeds and finds the Google is indeed breaking any rules those will be revealed and the Commission will start a legal process against Google.

This is more of a "Hey Google, "some people"(those Microsoft dudes we fined for $1.4b a few years back) are complaining that you are breaking our laws. We have decided to investigate whether this is true or not, in the interest of everybody involved(this is in your best interest because if you cooperate we will gi

Since Google is incorporated in Ireland(which is a member state) the Council can technically seize all of Google if they persist.
So yes very much I doubt Google is stupid enough to hope the problem goes away if they ignore EU.

Ok my bad, but the purpose of incorporating is typically to take advantage of the lower corporate tax so Google probably funnels much of their profits through that subsidiary and those funds can then be subject to seizure if Google repeatedly breaks EU law.

Google currently has 66% of the search market... Interesting that Microsoft is arguing that 66% market share amounts to a dominant, monopolisitic amount that puts Google into anti-trust territory. I wonder what market share Windows and Office currently have, and if Microsoft would accept that they have a monopoly there?

Are you kidding? They kicked Microsoft's ass and fined them almost 1.5 billion dollars -- even for Microsoft that's big. Since then they have this browser ballot screen and special Europe-only versions of Windows etc..

Are you kidding? They kicked Microsoft's ass and fined them almost 1.5 billion dollars

Actually, $1.5 billion was only the most recent fine, which was there for failing to properly comply with the 2004 court decision. There was another non-compliance fine of $450 million preceding that, and then there's there original fine of $800 million.

We are talking about EU here, not US. In most of the European countries Google has market share of more than 95% (in my country too). It is often the only choice you have as far as pay per click advertising goes.

In EU antitrust legislation a company doesn't even have to have >50% market share to be covered by the antitrust legislation, the company only needs to have a dominant position within the market or a substantial part of the market . To date the lowest market share that has been found to be "dominant" is 39.7%.

First, the EU begins their second assertion by not being sure. Are they serious? Emphasis is mine:

Our second concern relates to the way Google copies content from competing vertical search services and uses it in its own offerings. Google may be copying original material from the websites of its competitors such as user reviews and using that material on its own sites without their prior authorisation.

Then they base their next point on this unsubstantiated assertion...again, bold is mine.

In this way they are appropriating the benefits of the investments of competitors.

To make matters worse, they conflate the two issues to emphasize another point, this time focusing on the possibility. Again, emphasis mine.

We are worried that this could reduce competitors' incentives to invest in the creation of original content for the benefit of internet users. This practice may impact for instance travel sites or sites providing restaurant guides...

Google may be copying original material from the websites of its competitors such as user reviews and using that material on its own sites without their prior authorisation.

Bah. If their competitors don't know how to use robots.txt, they're not competent enough to be competitors. On the other hand, if Google is ignoringrobots.txt, then I think that would count as unauthorized access, and, given Google's monopoly position, a matter of deep concern.

Note: I think a great deal of the anti-Google nonsense that gets posted on slashdot is total nonsense (if not outright astroturfing), but what the EU is looking at here is something I think they are fully justified in investigating: actual potential anti-competitive behavior that would make sense for Google to engage in. But I agree with you that investigate is the key word there.

The competitors do want their sites to be tracked, after all they want their sites high on Google search etc.(which is part of the complaint).
What they don't want is for Google to start their own very similar service, "steal" the competitors data, implement said data in their own service and present that service higher in any relevant search.

Another thing is that as Google clearly has a dominant market position and as such has extra obligations in EU antitrust legislation and an "opt-out" standard such a

Yes the internet is obviously opt-in but that is not reason to not punish online behavior that the society sees as wrong and EU clearly believes that this behaviour might be wrong.

Yes they want to limit how Google can monetize their data because that action harms their business.
Google has become so ubiquitous that it pretty much is infrastructure these days and as such EU requires it to be neutral, I see nothing wrong with that.

So true. At least someone here uses their brain instead of their feelings.
This is how anti-trust forces operate. They are subjective and unscientific. Almost all of the above posters besides this one have responded with their "feelings" on the matter. Google is evil, so this is OK.
How about another approach- Google can do whatever Google wants with their search engine website. It's *their* website. "Google intentionally abusing their position"...they EARNED that position by making a search engine that th

How about another approach- Google can do whatever Google wants with their search engine website. It's *their* website. "Google intentionally abusing their position"...they EARNED that position by making a search engine that the whole world uses. They're not doing anything illegal by promoting their own services...that is the point.

The coalition of nations known as EU has as sovereign nations the right to make laws as they see fit within their borders, that right trumps Google's concerning everything within the borders of EU and EU legislation as presented in "Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union" makes certain business practices illegal
"Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the common market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the common

I have a friend that's been part of Google's product review team for a few years. From my understanding, they do not do content scraping for reviews when associating them to products. Websites must actually subscribe and push the data to google to have it included (or present an XML feed for google to fetch or something similar). Google has live humans going through and making sure that the people who sign up to populate product reviews are legitimate (spammers try to push crap comments to the system).

I suspect that an investigation was done which determined two things:1) It is concretely the case that Google was doing the kind of inclusion of competitors content that is complained about in the past, and2) It is clear that Google has stopped at least some of the complained about use

(Many, many articles on this story have pointed out that both of those are, in fact, the case with reviews on Google.)

As this is an opportunity for Google to address the concerns in advance of a pote

Entertaining isn't it. Not long since the their competitors were bitching about Googles own and paid results not being conspicuously enough marked. Google changed that and it didn't magically drive business to the complainers. Now the same leeches have told the EU that marking them conspicuously gives Google an unfair advantage!

After wading through 400 pages of self serving complaints from Microsoft fronts and ineffective businesses it seems the EU aren't really convinced they need to leap into action. 2 va

I think it's most likely that the Commission looked somewhat into the matter and found that it is likely that Google is up to something that is not completely in line with regulations but that it's not so major that it requires immediate direct intervention. The Commission would probably never to have to intervene and that everyone followed the law and as such prefers to give Google a chance to come clean and change it's ways rather than initiate a costly and time consuming legal process. Like Confucius sai